How to power growth through insights and research: Everyone is our target!

Words by Roberto Lartigue

Roberto Lartigue , EVP of Strategy at Known spoke at The Quirk's Event for Marketing Research & Insights Professionals on rethinking how to define growth audiences, shared best practices around creating data-backed growth strategies, and offered ways to implement these plans through creative and media experimentation. Throughout the next few weeks, we'll be sharing a series of four articles with Roberto's takeaways on how to power growth through insights and research, including how Known did this for one of its high growth clients, JUST Egg.

Which prospects power growth?

This is a seemingly easy question, but a difficult one to answer and it is really easy to get wrong. And at this moment, I’m guessing most companies are rethinking many aspects of their growth strategy. In particular marketing organizations are being asked to:

• Do more with less
• Prove their ROI
• Focus on profitability rather than growth at all costs

These shifts have an enormous downstream impact on the growth strategy of an organization, and how to approach where and how companies are investing. So identifying which prospects power growth is more important than ever.?

I have spent the majority of my career helping companies across industries answer this question. Over roughly 20 years, I’ve seen the tools and methodologies evolve, the data at our disposal has multiplied and become more accurate and actionable.

There is a massive opportunity right in front of researchers and marketers to increase the impact we have by leveraging research, data, and a test and learn approach to help companies answer this question. Let me tell you how we do it.?

So back to that question… Which prospects power growth??

To help answer this complicated question, we’ll start in this chapter with some context on why this question may be among the most important and impactful questions a company can answer, especially right now. Chapter 2 will lay out a simple process to identify the prospects that will power growth. Chapters 3 and 4 will take us through a real life example of work we did for JUST Egg.

Our approach

At Known, Research and Strategy are part of an integrated solution. We believe that a thoughtfully-crafted marketing and brand strategy ensures that we start from the right place, from customer truths that inform everything we do. Our creative team brings it to life and makes it beautiful, and then our PhD data scientists on our Media team will optimize it.

Beyond this being a self-serving ad for Known, this is the foundation of how we answer the question about how data and insights can lead to customer growth.

With that preamble, let’s get to the question at hand…

Q: Who is your target market?? A: Everyone

We’ve all sat in rooms where you ask your client, be it internal or external... “Who is your target market?” And it is difficult to believe that in these modern times, they answer “Everyone is our target.” While I admire the ambition, unless you have infinite budget and resources, this is not a helpful answer. We know that from a product development, creative, and media buying perspective, it is better to have a more defined target. “Everyone is our target” is a statement about aspiration, but it is not a growth target.

On the other side, some people constrain their category too narrowly. Instead of insisting on everyone, they may say something like “We only want to target vegans,” and that, too, isn’t super helpful.

This is really important!

How you define your growth prospects is insanely important to a business, especially in the present economic environment. This decision flows through your entire business strategy and has a massive impact on your organization. In fact, there aren’t many other decisions with this kind of downstream impact. It impacts everything listed here:

The three that we think are important and influenceable from the research, insights and data perspective are:?

• New product development including determining product features
• Media buying
• Creative and messaging?

And when you think about it, these three areas represent a very large portion of what a company is spending their money on.?

How does research and insight fit in?

Having worked in research and insights for a large portion of my career, I know this world can be a place where we do the work, prepare a polished deck, hand off a report, and then move on. However, we are at an inflection point where researchers can have greater business impact than ever before. If we can pull our findings and insights through, it can have massive ROI impact––in the product, media buying, creative, and messaging domains, and further beyond.

In the next installment, I will share thoughts on how, at Known, we help our customers define their growth prospects. In particular, I’ll outline the three components of a great customer strategy. And in the meantime, I’m curious if anyone has some advice or tricks on:

• How are you handling the rethinking of growth strategy, especially in the current economic climate, when being asked to do more with less, and/or focus on profit over growth??
• How have you approached answering the “Which prospects power growth?” question, or challenges you’ve faced in this area, especially from sitting in the research seat??

Until then, thanks for reading. Share in the comments anything you'd like Roberto Lartigue to expand on in future articles.